perfidy

That the weaknesses of the Soviet Bloc did not appear until the seventies is ridiculous. The only thing that changed in the seventies is that the Soviet Bloc was now trying to do two things with an inefficient economy, instead of one. In the sixties, the Soviets were spending 10-15% of GNP on defense, and even higher if you count nominally civilian projects with military uses. They were spending a larger fraction of a smaller economy on defense. But the nightmares of the Soviet economy go back to forced collectivization, the rural electrification projects, and the like in the twenties and thirties. To say that economic problems suddenly developed in the seventies ignores the inefficiencies that were always present in the Soviet system.